dir. Sergei Bondarchuk (1966)
Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, originally released split into four feature-length pictures, is a masterclass in scale. Any adaptation of a dense tome like Tolstoy’s masterpiece will have material to spare, and so the 7h+ spent here in the world of Napoleonic-era Russia are still never slow nor lacking in action, be it the spinning ballrooms of St Petersburg, the field of Borodino or Moscow as it burns. The Red Army famously provided over ten thousand extras to fill the opposing armies for those tremendous combat sequences which see cavalry charges crash into infantry lines onscreen.